Secrets of Sports Science
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Faster, Higher, Stronger…yes! But how do elite athletes get there? With a little help from sports science, of course. This is the golden age of athleticism. It’s no coincidence that it’s also the golden age of sports science. Rudraneil Sengupta goes behind the scenes to talk to scientists, coaches and trainers to understand how athletes run faster, jump higher, get stronger, and play longer. If you are interested in sports, muscles, speed, power, strength and agility, press play.
This is a Hindustan Times production, brought to you by HT Smartcast.
This is a Hindustan Times production, brought to you by HT Smartcast.
13 Episodes
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It's not just his Olympic gold. Abhinav Bindra has been a pioneer when it comes to sports science in India as well. He is the first of our athletes who immersed himself in the best practices followed globally and who advocated for it tirelessly. It eventually resulted in the Abhinav Bindra Targeting Performance or ABTP centres that are spread across India, equipped with the finest technology and knowhow when it comes to sports science. On this episode, the director of ABTP, who was also Bindra's personal physio during his shooting days, speaks about the importance of training and recovery in shooting and the kind of stress that the body goes through trying to hold an unnatural posture with complete stiffness for hours. You thought standing still was easy?
In 2018, after Mirabai Chanu won her first Commonwealth Games gold, a back injury threatened to end her career. In this episode, Mirabai's physiotherapist talks about how that problem was fixed, taking us on a fascinating journey through the world of high-performance physiotherapy, the highly scientific and data-driven approach to injury prevention and management, and the pressures and pleasures of trying to make the best athletes in the world even better. Parsania leads the physiotherapy department at the Inspire Institute of Sports in Bellary, Karnataka, and also works with Lovlina Borgohain, Mary Kom, and Vinesh Phogat among others.
What is the process of building muscle? What's the difference between training for hypertrophy (increasing muscle size), strength, and power? How is it possible that you can have big muscles but not great strength? What role does the central nervous system (CNS) play in muscle building and how can you harness and train the CNS? How are strength, power or hypertrophy training programs made for elite athletes?
Coach Abhinav is the strength & conditioning expert at Inspire Institute of Sports in Bellary, and works with India's finest boxers and wrestlers, from Bajrang Punia to Amit Panghal, and worked with Neeraj Chopra ahead of the Tokyo Olympics to return him to full fitness after a surgery to the throwing arm. He shares his deep insight into all things MUSCLE in this episode!
Are you feeling more fatigued than usual? Do you have unexplained aches and pains? Struggling to do mileage that usually comes easy to you? Chances are, you are dehydrated and you don't know it.Distance running in India means running in the heat and humidity for most of the year. With extreme heat conditions becoming more frequent, heatwaves getting longer, it has become critical to understand the principles of hydration. What does dehydration do to you? What can you do to prevent it? Does only water help, or do you need electrolytes? Ultramarathon runner Dr Chauhan, who organises one of India's toughest marathons, La Ultra in Ladakh, tackles the tricky subject. Dehydration: the runner's enemy, with Dr Rajat Chauhan
Understanding the three pillars of endurance running: VO2 Max, Muscle Efficiency and Lactate Threshold, and how to program a training schedule that will address each of these while being a fun, varied workout. How can you calculate your VO2 Max without equipment? Why do you need to know your Maximal Heart Rate to make your training more efficient? How do you calculate it accurately and why is your wearable not trustworthy? Elite running coach Van Den Broek, who runs a training centre in Iten, Kenya, reveals how the best train and why you can use that knowledge to make your running better at any level.
This is an era of chronic sleep deprivation, triggered largely by our addiction to the screens of our personal devices. But how do athletes deal with sleep deprivation? What's the relationship with sleep and athletic performance? Why should athletes carry their own pillows and switch off their phones at night? Do short naps have any benefits when it comes to performance? And why is it that our strength and power outputs are better in the evening? Is training for elite athletes structured according to the time of day? All those answers and more with Dr Pullinger, the Head of Sports Science at the Inspire Institute of Sports in Bellary, where India's finest athletes live and train.
South African strength & conditioning specialist Dr. Wayne Lombard was the Indian women's hockey team's scientific advisor from 2017 to 2021. He led the coaching staff that took over a struggling team and made them into world-class athletes in time for the Tokyo Olympics, where the unfancied Indian team then went on a wild, fairytale ride all the way to the bronze medal playoffs. In this episode, Dr. Lombard answers some critical questions: how do you assess a player's fitness? How do you build a neuromuscular profile for an athlete? Why is a simple jump called the Countermovement Jump such a great indicator of athletic ability and game readiness? What is the relationship between an athlete's perceived fatigue and what machines tell us about the state of his or her physical fatigue? How can that be bridged?
Dr Orchard was on the field that day in 2014 when Phillip Hughes got hit in the head by a cricket ball and died later from his injury. It marked the beginning of a long campaign by Dr Orchard and others to introduce concussion rules in cricket. In late 2019, Marnus Labuschagne became the first concussion substitute in the 142-year history of Test cricket. In this episode, Dr Orchard talks about the research, advocacy and negotiations that went into convincing the cricket world of the need for concussion rules. Why like-for-like replacements are so important in the game, and the increasing need to address the possible dangers of repeated head impacts in any sport.
There was a time when the best footballers in the world—from Maradona to Johann Cruyff or Zinadine Zidane—learned their skills playing street football. Now promising footballers go into academies by the time they are six. Is this formal coaching environment killing creativity in sports? Is prescriptive coaching—where it’s the coach’s way or the highway—an outdated model? What makes a good coach? How can players develop creativity? These are the questions at the root of Dr. Mark Williams’ decades-long research, which led to the book The Best: How Elite Athletes are Made.
In this episode, Dr. Williams dives deep into what the data says about formal coaching vs informal play in the development of elite athletes.
You may know him as Neeraj Chopra's coach. But Dr Bartonietz or "Dr Javelin" is one of the world's leading experts on throws, and has been conducting research and analysis on it since 1975. Now, as Neeraj Chopra gets ready to throw competitively again a year after his Tokyo Gold--he will be participating in the Paavo Nurmi Games in Finland on June 14--Dr Bartonietz breaks down the technical complexities of the javelin throw and why Neeraj is ready to breach the 90m mark. From release momentum to the biomechanics of braking, from release angles to the role of the shoulder, learn why just being big and muscular doesn't mean you will throw longer distances.
What is the key to mental toughness? Should you believe everything your brain tells you? What is mindfulness? How do you shift from thinking to doing? Can you make your nervousness work for you? Elite sports psychologist Dr. Eddie O'Connor talks about the mental training of athletes, and how to befriend your anxiety and listen to it.
Do you supinate or pronate to generate spin to the cricket ball? How can you get more revs per minute? Are you a fast bowler looking to increase speed? How can you do it without the risk of injury? Do the classical coaching manual techniques hold up to the scrutiny of modern cricket biomechanical observations? Dr. Rene Ferdinands from the University of Sydney, one of the world’s leading sports biomechanisms, reveals the secrets of what happens to the human body when it’s bowling during a game of cricket.
John Gloster, the physiotherapist and head of sports science for Rajasthan Royals, talks about assessing players before the start of a season, creating individual training programs using data, the risk of injury when switching formats, and the huge array of technology — from GPS trackers and Far Infrared Clothing to rings that monitor sleep and heart rate.
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